part 3. The False Start

Remember my previous post? The one that outlined my concern for the validity of my ticket? Well, turns out my concerns were justified.

I'm writing this from my house, not from Thailand. My flight didn't exist. I had a ticket that told me a flight would leave Gatwick Airport at 2230 hours on Sunday 2nd December, and that I had a seat reserved on it. STA travel, it would appear, are unable to check timetables of flights leaving Gatwick to see if there is actually a flight on that day before they take your money and send you a ticket with all the information printed clearly on it. Silly Jim for believing they would have done that first. In their defense, it is apparently a new airline that has only been running flights out of Gatwick for a few weeks. Their recent schedule changes, which involves no longer running flights out of that airport on a Sunday, was something they didn't think was important enough to notify the travel operator people about.

I spent last night in a hotel at the airport. It was a nice hotel, with a nice bed (as the woman at the front desk told me about as I checked in, twice) and they paid for me to have breakfast and lunch etc. Still, this is nothing in comparison to the holiday I had planned. Bah!

Jim is annoyed, though quite calm. I'm back home, I'm drinking cold cider, I'm calm. hmmmm.

I have to wait until tomorrow now, there was a flight to Muskat (in Oman) but no connecting flight to Bangkok until tomorrow. Grrr. I will be sitting here getting drunk until tomorrow (in order to overcome my emotional turmoil) and then unleashing the full might of my wrath upon those responsible tomorrow.

Watch this space

Jim